A gothic tale of ghosts, infidelity,
murder, and love, Castle Dismal follows
the protagonist Ned Clifton, a “veteran bachelor” who fears the bonds of
marriage, in his holiday visit to the home of married friends. Set during the Christmas season in South Carolina,
Simms’s story illustrates the southern custom of bringing together family
around a table to feast; and while Clifton eventually marries Elizabeth
Singleton—freeing him from the “melancholy dependencies of bachelorism”—Simms
subverts naïve nineteenth-century notions of marriage and domesticity.[1] Marked ...

While one of the lesser-known of
Simms’s border romances, the novella Helen
Halsey is nevertheless a strong work, indicative of the overall project the
author undertook in that series. The
first mention of Helen Halsey in the Letters was in June 1843. By September, Simms told James Lawson that the
work was “nearly ready.” Helen Halsey was “to follow up” Simms’s
ghost story Castle Dismal, a work he
announces in the same letter to be sending to “the Harpers.”[1]
Letters to Lawson from this time period
indicate that the author was interested in shopping ...